Thursday, December 12, 2013

Renaissance Astronomy: Roots

If a single event can be said to be
the origin of the modern world we live in today, it would be 1300s
Italy and the birth of the Italian Renaissance, which would, over the
coming decades, spread across Europe and remake the entire world
thanks to the fact that Europe was, despite its intellectual
backwardness, a continent on the move.

The word 'renaissance' itself is of Italian in origin and roughly means 'rebirth.' To understand why the Renaissance was a rebirth, one has to take a brief look back through history.

Thales of Miletus

The Classical civilization of Greece
and Rome was the peak of European civilization when the Renaissance
started in the late 1300s. Starting in around 600 B.C., man started
to try and explain the world rationally and express the belief that
the world was knowable if observed and that laws of nature, rather
that the will of God/the gods, shaped world events. In the centuries
that followed the assertion made by Thales of Miletus that the world
was not of godly, but of natural origin, science as a way of
understanding the world blossomed. In Classical world, the following,
fundamental truths were recognized:

1. The universe was of natural origin
and did not require God/the gods (not all accepted this)2. The
first explanations of the celestial bodies as places3. The Earth
was discovered to be spherical4. Proofs of a spherical Earth were
found5. The first models of the solar system were created6.
Earth's circumference was measured to a few percent its true size7.
Precession of the equinoxes was recognized8. Stars were mapped
and classified by brightness

Unfortunately, the ancients were
not perfect, some ideas were dead wrong (and appear silly today):

1.
The Earth was the center of the solar system2. The heavens were
perfect and unchanging3. Could never divorce the idea of God/the
gods playing a role

However, despite their errors, the Classical astronomers were making important breakthroughs every time they came up with a hypothesis that explained the world naturally. Today, following in that tradition, modern astrophysicists are seeking to find a theory that explains the origin of the universe itself as a natural event, a difficult pill for some to swallow even today.

The Death of Socrates (1787)

Needless to say, this golden age of
science (and among other things literature, theater, philosophy, free
inquiry, democracy, and many other societal virtues) was not to last.
Even in the Classical age itself, the tide began to turn against the
very things that had made the civilization so great. Emperors
replaced democratically-elected leaders (Republican Rome became
Imperial Rome), freedom of thought began to be squashed (Socrates was
just the start), and science began to be subservient to religion
(Scientists increasingly found themselves branded heretics). By the
time the political creation that was the Western Roman Empire fell in
476 A.D., the golden age of Classical civilization was long past as
knowledge had long since taken a back seat to bad leadership, civil
wars, and barbarian invasions.

Unfortunately, things would get even worse.

The Last Judgment: a common scene in Dark Age cathedrals.

The Christian Church, which started
as an underground religion, came to the surface when emperor
Constantine the Great converted to Christianity. With the political
disintegration, the Church saw itself as the successor to Rome. After
the last Roman emperor was deposed, Western Europe went from a single
political organization (albeit an increasingly tenuous one) into
hundreds of tiny, often warring kingdoms. With the power that was
Rome gone, people ran to local warlords for protection. In the face
of such political disunity, the Christian faith was the single factor
binding Europe together. Seeing this potential for power, church
leaders lorded it over peasant and king alike, demanding total
obedience in return for a chance to go to Heaven.

In a climate of such fear, it is
little wonder that freedom of thought was soon squashed.

For the Church, the findings of the
Classical scientists often went contrary to the Bible. In their sense
of self-righteousness, the Church leaders, when encountering
something that went contrary to their holy books, simply declared the
observation to be in error, anyone who professed belief in it top be
a heretic, and then tried to sweep the unsettling discovery under the
proverbial rug in the hope that no one would ever find it again. In
the centuries to follow, it is little wonder that Europe would become
a continent of the uninformed, ignorant, and superstitious.

Fortunately, this Dark Age would not
last forever.

Meanwhile, while Christian Europe was
in the midst of its 1,000 year, largely dreamless sleep, the Islamic
and Byzantine worlds would serve as a repository for what was, at
least to Western Europe, lost knowledge. However, besides simply
preserving the findings of their forebears, the Byzantines and
Muslims would go on to do new astronomy, building observatories and
mapping the stars in the tradition of the ancients. More so than any
other people, the Muslims saved Classical astronomy from intellectual
oblivion.

The start of the astronomical
Renaissance was in places where Christians and Muslims lived
peaceably (yes, this did happen), most notably in Muslim-controlled
Spain. In such places, works in Arabic were translated into the
Christian-dominant language. In another vein, while Western Europe
may have had no inherent interest in science, it did have an interest
in exotic goods brought by way of the Byzantine Empire, which
effectively bridged the East and West. Besides goods, the trade
routes would also bring new ideas to Western Europe.

With a new-found, although not overly
deep interest in astronomy, Europeans discovered a rather perplexing
problem: all of the Byzantine/Islamic start charts showed the stars
positioned differently than their own, which turned out to be in
error. The question of why the stars on the old charts were
incorrectly placed (precession is why) was the spark that reignited
long-suppressed curiosity of European intellectuals. In short order,
Europe would begin on its slow path towards discovery once again. The
first universities were founded in the 11-1200s, better scientific
instruments were developed so as to minimize errors, and more
scientists actually took to experiment rather than remain as mere
commentators. Then in 1453, the watershed event of European history
took place: the Byzantine Empire, which had survived its Roman
brother for 1,000 years, finally collapsed, after which all kinds of
curiosity spurring texts came flooding out and into Western Europe.

Constantinople, Byzantine capital, was situated at the crossroads of Europe, Asia, and Africa.

With the collapse of the Byzantine Empire, Europeans finally had a practical reason to become interested in astronomy: trade. Up until 1453, Western European traders had a pretty easy time of it traversing the Byzantine trade routes. When the Ottoman Turks took over, seeing the potential for revenue, they upped the fees for traders passing through to the point where some monarchs deemed it cheaper in the long run to try and find a new way to Asia than pay the fees the Ottomans demanded in exchange for safe passage.

Ships were the spacecraft of the 13-1400s.

In the 1400s, sailing ships were like spacecraft are today. When a sailor left home port, he was, in effect, sailing to an uncharted new world far beyond the help of his home country, much the way astronauts in space do so today. In crossing the oceans to journey to distant lands, sailors might as well have been sailing to Mars. At the time, finding longitude was the biggest navigational challenge. Latitude was easy, simply look at what Northern stars you could see in a given location to tell approximately how far you had gone. Longitude? Well, that was tough. Traveling East-West had no easy answers, except, quite possibly, in the stars and in more accurate methods of timekeeping. With rich nobles wanting their exotic spices and fine silks, science, specifically astronomy, finally had a practical application.

The Black Death changed the face of Europe (and inspired decidedly macabre art)

At the same time, the Black Death was
raging through Europe. First hitting in the “great mortality” of
1347, the Black Death would wipe out about a third of Europe's
population in the years 1347-1352. While such a terrible, gruesome
disease in itself would have been horrifying enough to an ignorant
populace, the fact that the all-powerful Catholic Church could not do
a thing to stop its spread increased the already terrible feelings of
helplessness. When watching so many die and nothing being done to
halt the spread of death, faith in the Church was shaken. Perhaps the
Catholic Church that had dominated European life for 1,000 years
wasn't so powerful after all.

In time, these three things, exposure
to intellectual achievement, the collapse of Byzantium, and the loss
of faith in the Catholic Church would lead to the Renaissance, the
rebirth of Europe.